When the young man was gone, we countermanded our
candles, and ordered some brandy and water.
The great billows had gone over our head. The
Royal Nautical Sportsmen were as nice young fellows
as a man would wish to see, but they were a trifle
too young and a thought too nautical for us.
We began to see that we were old and cynical; we
liked ease and the agreeable rambling of the human
mind about this and the other subject; we did not
want to disgrace our native land by messing an eight,
or toiling pitifully in the wake of the champion canoeist.
In short, we had recourse to flight. It seemed
ungrateful, but we tried to make that good on a card
loaded with sincere compliments. And indeed
it was no time for scruples; we seemed to feel the
hot breath of the champion on our necks.
AT MAUBEUGE
Partly from the terror we had of our good friends
the Royal Nauticals, partly from the fact that there
were no fewer than fifty-five locks between Brussels
and Charleroi, we concluded that we should travel
by train across the frontier, boats and all.
Fifty-five locks in a day’s journey was pretty
well tantamount to trudging the whole distance on
foot, with the canoes upon our shoulders, an object
of astonishment to the trees on the canal side, and
of honest derision to all right-thinking children.
To pass the frontier, even in a train, is a difficult
matter for the Arethusa. He is somehow or other
a marked man for the official eye. Wherever
he journeys, there are the officers gathered together.
Treaties are solemnly signed, foreign ministers,
ambassadors, and consuls sit throned in state from
China to Peru, and the Union Jack flutters on all
the winds of heaven. Under these safeguards,
portly clergymen, school-mistresses, gentlemen in
grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British
touristry pour unhindered, Murray in hand, over the
railways of the Continent, and yet the slim person
of the Arethusa is taken in the meshes, while these
great fish go on their way rejoicing. If he
travels without a passport, he is cast, without any
figure about the matter, into noisome dungeons:
if his papers are in order, he is suffered to go
his way indeed, but not until he has been humiliated
by a general incredulity. He is a born British
subject, yet he has never succeeded in persuading
a single official of his nationality. He flatters
himself he is indifferent honest; yet he is rarely
taken for anything better than a spy, and there is
no absurd and disreputable means of livelihood but
has been attributed to him in some heat of official
or popular distrust. . . .
For the life of me I cannot understand it. I
too have been knolled to church, and sat at good men’s
feasts; but I bear no mark of it. I am as strange
as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles.
I might come from any part of the globe, it seems,
except from where I do. My ancestors have laboured
in vain, and the glorious Constitution cannot protect
me in my walks abroad. It is a great thing,
believe me, to present a good normal type of the nation
you belong to.
